In order to compare web hosting packages and rates, it is important to understand a little about how web hosting works.

The web is just that - a web of connections between millions of computers. If you think of the Internet as a plumbing network, it starts to become a little more clear. There are small pipes coming into your home or office, and large pipes running beneath the streets. The Internet is really not much different, so it makes good sense to have your website hosted somewhere with good pipeline connections, right? Absolutley, and what we want to gain quick access to is known as the "Backbone&qot; of the Internet. This backbone runs throughout much of the USA and into a few larger Canadian cities.

Surprisingly, not many people put much thought into where their website is hosted, they may in fact choose a smaller local company that is poorly connected to the distant Internet backbone, or a larger company who out-sources the hosting to Eastern Europe or India. Because visitors to your website must follow the backbone to your hosting company, it makes more sense to use the shortest and fastest route. After years of trial and error, I finally settled on a data centre located in Texas, well connected to the backbone.

After many years of reliable service, I am now a reseller for this data centre, branding my hosting business under the name HostSafe. My clients have enjoyed stable, fast and secure hosting, and at an affordable cost. I call this level of hosting "Premium Hosting", becuase of our stability, longevity, security, speed, financial stability and overall reliability. HostSafe's Data Center was named number 17 in the Top 50 Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America, and for two years in a row, Microsoft has honored them with the Hosting Provider of the Year distinction from over 1800 entries.

Here is a little more information about our Data Center

Production Area HostSafe's Data Center uses custom configured Dell PowerEdge servers. Systems are provisioned and version-controlled by CORE, the proprietary hosting operations system. Systems are monitored on an ongoing basis for availability, performance and reliability.

HVAC System The Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning system is N+1 redundant, meaning that there is a duplicate system on standby to take over. Air is circulated and filtered every 90 seconds, removing dust and contaminants. In the unlikely event of a fire or other damage, all cables to servers and routing equipment are duplicated with another set of cables on the other side of the data centre. Data is automatically routed to these cables should it ever be necessary.

Power System All servers are fed with conditioned Uninterruptable Power Supply power that will prevent interruption if utility power fails. In the unlikely event of an extended power outage, one or more on-site diesel generators can run indefinitely. These generators are regularly tested to ensure continuous functionality in the event of an emergency.

Zero-Downtime Network The Cisco-powered, Zero-Downtime Network with unique self-healing attributes is based on multiple bandwidth providers and the BGP4 networking protocol. Fully redundant, enterprise-class routing equipment is housed in its own secure, core routing room, and fed with its own reduntant power supplies. Fibre carriers enter the facilities at disparate access points to ensure that there is never a service failure, even in the unlikely event of a fibre cut.

Security Access to the data centre is restricted by two-factor authentication, including Biometric hand scanners. Only level three technicians have access. Public access is strictly forbidden. All entrances and common areas are monitored 24X7 bia closed-circuit cameras.

More reasons why I chose this particular Data Center:

• HostSafe's Data Center does not use their network for any purposes other than managed hosting - no telecom services or cable TV service take priority over our customers needs, unlike other data centres.
• They use only high performance bandwidth, unlike many cheaper hosting providers
• They have partnered with nine network providers to provide multiple redundancies in information flow to and from data centers and end users. Most hosting companies use one or two network providers.
• Fiber carriers enter data centers at disparate access points protect the network from complete service failure in the unlikely event of a network cable cut.
• The data center's Proactive Network Management methodology continually monitors and automatically improves the network topology and configuration in real time based on route efficiency and end-user performance, ensuring the fastest and most reliable network connections.
• They maintain low overall network utilization, providing resiliency from the largest Internet routing issues.
• A highly redundant network configuration co-developed with Cisco protects against single points of failure at the shared network level (with an option to extend into customer's VLAN environment).
• They have partnered with Cisco and Arbor Networks to create ever-improving methods to monitor and secure the network from intrusions.

Since most websites are around 2 or 3 Megs in size, and larger sites are generally slower sites, my emphasis is on getting your website pages to display as quickly and efficiently as possible. For that reason, storage space is essentially a non-issue. Most hosting companies use stoage space as a basis for comparison, they may have a poorly connected network, but will give you a thousand Megs of storage space, of which you may end up using one or two, and end up offline a lot of the time anyway. It's simply not the way I sell web hosting.

What I do provide is Premium hosting with a realistic amount of space, little or no down-time, fast speeds, high reliability and a secure environment for your data. Most months have seen 100% uptime, and the problematic months are still well over 99%, proving HostSafe to be one of the most reliable web hosting solutions available.

Need a little more convincing about the state of web hosting, and what is really happening to customers websites in the real world? The following excerpts came from a public forum about web hosting problems, these are the actual messages posted by the users. I have removed the names of the hosting companies for legal reasons.

• "Websites knocked out by hosting firm power failure... Fire alarm locked out hosting company staff while the batteries ran out...London hosting firm ***** has blamed a power outage for a meltdown which took many of its customers off the web on Tuesday morning."
• "***** had a major problem with thier UPS systems feeding part of their datacentre, causing a large section of the network to go offline, including all staff PCs and their own websites. During this downtime they did not communicate with their clients until hours passed, even then they barely told us anything, as we found being a customer of *****. The downtime was estimated at 6 hours for many clients, some longer."
• "Anyone know anything new concerning *****, reason I ask is when my site goes down (hosted by them) their website is always still up and running. My sites down atm and just tried to get on *****.com to try live chat and found thats down also. Is this company winding things down, as the last couple of weeks their service (downtime and customer service) has been worse than normal? update: their main site has now just come back online but mine is still down and they won't answer live chat atm and I seem to get the run around quite often when these sorts of issues arise. I'm starting to get more than a little pi**ed off with their current service and the fact the main site is going offline for long periods of time is a concern."
• "My ***** hosting account has now been down for three days! It's not their fault, of course, they tell me. After all, hardware problems do happen. I actually had a response to a trouble ticket telling me that clearly I didn't understand the situation, that they are not responsible for hardware problems, and that I should be happy that they have engineers working 24/7 to restore all accounts (this as after the site had been down two days). And because their engineers were doing such a good job, my site would be back up within 9 - 12 hours (that's about 24 hours ago). And after all, many hosting providers don't even bother restore accounts when hardware fails. Who are these people!! Are they nuts? Is this a real hosting company or a joke?"
• "*****, where I've been a customer for number of years (just about 4, I believe) has had a continuous increase in daily downtime. My logs now show an average of 2.13 hours per day of down time. I've stopped trying to contact ***** because they just don't seem to have the resources to respond (the help ticketing system is practically unusable, the IRC channel is vacant most times I visit, and repeated email to support addresses go unanswered after months)."
• "***** has been down for the last couple of days. Does anyone know any details as to what's going on? I'm about this close to taking my business elsewhere as I have heard -nothing- from them."
• "Naturally I'm waiting for an important e-mail from a customer and my website as well as *****.com sites have been down since friday as far as I can tell. Tried calling the number listed in googles cache but didn't get an answer. HELP!?"
• "I'm on ***** and approaching hour 36 of this problem. Up and down, ***** Failed, but sometimes it works."
• "These guys are the WORSE admins/support team I've ever dealth with. their entire network has been down for over 6 hours now and their techs arent smart enough to fix their issues; Their admins don't even have physical access to their DC and do their jobs remotely from out of the country. Stupid."
• "I'm on ***** and approaching hour 36 of this problem. Up and down, ***** Failed, but sometimes it works."

The next time you see web hosting with huge amounts of storage space being provided for rock-bottom prices, think again. I can provide fast and reliable "Premium Hosting" for less than $20.00 a month, with all the space you really need. I also provide discounted prices if you prepay for longer periods. Please contact me for details, or visit HostSafe.ca.